On Friday the thirteenth of February in 1970, a little band from Birmingham, England released their self-titled debut album, Black Sabbath. Shortly after it hit the United States, an up and coming music critic by the name of Lester Bangs sat before his typewriter and clacked away at the keys late into the night until he produced five paragraphs about the record that would be printed in Rolling Stone magazine. Of the 575 words Bangs delivered, not one was positive, a hit job from top to bottom. Frontman Ozzy Osbourne didn’t read the review. Every musician says they don’t read the reviews, but Osbourne, a dyslexic, is perhaps the only one who is true to his word. But his bandmates sure told him about it, recanting for him choice phrases like “claptrap,” “shuck,” and “doggerel.”

Maybe there is no saving the world from the violence and hatred it feels toward Muslims. We pretend as if that hate has just arrived, as if it will go away soon, once the election cycle ends. We think of it as an American problem, and not a world problem. Rather, it is the machine that has always been at a low hum, incrementally growing louder each month, day, hour. Eventually, we will be able to hear nothing else. For Muslim teenagers who are like I was, looking for a temporary salve, the existence of Zayn Malik is enough. Representation can be simply the ability to imagine a shared experience with someone who is larger than life. Knowing that Zayn Malik perhaps also once answered a call to prayer while a red sun crawled underneath the horizon, like I once did, is enough. He’s a complicated, layered pop star who follows Islam, who is, still, only defined by it when a joke or a threat can be made. There is nothing more American than this — the identity that hangs over us most closely, the one that can still get us killed.

If indie rock once stood against the bluster of the mainstream, by the 2000s many bands faced a new challenge: They were the mainstream. These young bands have inherited that challenge. One of the reasons to be excited about indie rock was that historically it didn’t face the cookie-cutter constraints of radio or major labels. Factors like the transformative success of The O.C. as a soundtrack and cultural force, the collapse of the traditional music industry, and people forgoing the radio for iPods forced many bands toward a path of sync licenses (soundtracking TV and commercials), often necessitating odd corporate plays in order to have anything resembling a career. The bands that suited the palate of this mainstream were ones that could plausibly fit into inoffensive, accessible, cute, quirky spaces: Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Death Cab for Cutie, Grizzly Bear. Their collective summit of Mt. Urban Outfitters created a pathway, which in turn created a code — if your band checked these boxes of poesy and generic indie rock sound, then you, too, could have it all. The result is a generation of bands that make music that could easily fade into the background if you don’t keep the volume high enough.

yr royal highness

Women who appreciate emo are treated as teenagers without taste (another binary I take issue with). Women who appreciate hardcore are taken for band girlfriends or groupies. Blackness in the scene is often equated with confusion – people of color are, somehow, not expected to lay to a claim to a genre that lauded itself as belonging to all people.

My opinions on Drake or Chance the Rapper (both of whom I love but know a little less about) seem to carry more weight than my opinions on Brand New. My fandom, musicianship and expertise, at best, has been met with amusement, even though I dragged an electric guitar and Ibanez amp around every day for half of secondary school.

If indie rock once stood against the bluster of the mainstream, by the 2000s many bands faced a new challenge: They were the mainstream. These young bands have inherited that challenge. One of the reasons to be excited about indie rock was that historically it didn’t face the cookie-cutter constraints of radio or major labels. Factors like the transformative success of The O.C. as a soundtrack and cultural force, the collapse of the traditional music industry, and people forgoing the radio for iPods forced many bands toward a path of sync licenses (soundtracking TV and commercials), often necessitating odd corporate plays in order to have anything resembling a career. The bands that suited the palate of this mainstream were ones that could plausibly fit into inoffensive, accessible, cute, quirky spaces: Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Death Cab for Cutie, Grizzly Bear. Their collective summit of Mt. Urban Outfitters created a pathway, which in turn created a code — if your band checked these boxes of poesy and generic indie rock sound, then you, too, could have it all. The result is a generation of bands that make music that could easily fade into the background if you don’t keep the volume high enough.

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So I finally read this, and I actually think it's a poorly written article. He basically cherry picks two male indie bands whom he didn't think put out good records, and say that it's dead. However he's ignoring so many other male led "indie rock" bands that do so many other, better things without making stale records (that article about Pinegrove, TWIABP, Two Inch Astronaut and other EIS bands). I think he could have done this article while focusing far more on the amazing female/queer indie bands out there (Mitski, Eskimeaux, the ones he mentioned, etc) while not just slamming a whole group of artists.

Yes, indie rock is still very white male led, obviously, I just think the way he wrote this article doesn't actually bring anyone up and instead just puts things down.

yr royal highness

I had to read it twice to understand it, but he chose two stale bands as a talking point. He could've said literally any two other bands and it would've had the same meaning tbh, because the point was they're not doing anything new, yet still receiving critical acclaim that others aren't getting.

I already said it, but I'm bored with the discussion on how white and male rock music is if the alternative is white and female. Why even bring up race if your alternatives are White Lady Band and Similar Sounding White Lady Band? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I had to read it twice to understand it, but he chose two stale bands as a talking point. He could've said literally any two other bands and it would've had the same meaning tbh, because the point was they're not doing anything new, yet still receiving critical acclaim that others aren't getting.

I already said it, but I'm bored with the discussion on how white and male rock music is if the alternative is white and female. Why even bring up race if your alternatives are White Lady Band and Similar Sounding White Lady Band? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, all the bands he mentioned are those getting lots of critical acclaim.
And I know it's not a lot, but indie music as a whole seems a lot more queer and female and more people of color than ever before, at least in the east coast DIY scenes, more than ever

yr royal highness

We could blame the corporate lifestyle marketing that exploited a demographic codified and monetized by Pitchfork, blog networks, and Internet hustlers of all stripes. But it’s also the earnestly clever bros growing up and wanting to cash in (or weigh in); it’s the Internet’s boost to savvy DIY entrepreneurs; and, unmistakably, it’s the entitlement and creative inertia of privilege. So when David Turner wrote a piece called “Is Indie Rock Over for the White Male Voice?” last week, it was a perfectly reasonable, modest query. Of course, a raft of bros took to social media, decrying race as any factor (surprise!), even advising Turner that he should’ve written about the current wave of thriving indie-rock women instead. Oh, cool, feminist posturing in the service of racial denial! Also, let’s gin up another “women who rock” trend piece. Thanks for the tip, fellas!

NICE. Especially nice to see Adia Victoria getting more press, because she deserves allllll your money.

Wasn't really sure where to put this, so if it's not particularly appropriate I apologize.
Yesterday I was talking with a man (probably in his mid 50s) and he asked what I do and I said I was a musician and his eyes lit up and he got really excited and was like "You've gotta tell me what instrument you play" and I said I was a drummer and his eyes lit up even more and he started asking about who my favorite drummers are, what kind of music I play, what my kit is made up of, etc. It's sad, but it was really kind of lovely to be met with immediate acceptance instead of some kind of cautious belief or acceptance. And it's the first time in a while I felt like I was being spoken to about drumming the way I see two guys talk about it.

There is plenty of good news in the music industry’s latest sales report released this week. Streaming is up. Vinyl has continued its unlikely renaissance. And did we mention that streaming is up?

But a closer look shows that the big sales numbers that have sustained the recorded music business for years are way down, and it is hard to see how they could ever return to where they were even a decade ago.

Revenue from music sales in the United States has hovered around $7 billion since 2010, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. For 2015, the number was $7.02 billion, up slightly less than 1 percent from 2014.

Within that steady total, however, have been drastic shifts in listener behavior. CDs and downloads have been gradually abandoned as streaming has become the platform of choice.

The result is that the music industry finds itself fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars. For instance, the growing but still specialized market for vinyl records is generating more revenue than the music on YouTube, one of the biggest destinations on the Internet, but that’s because YouTube pays royalties in the tiniest fractions of cents.